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Sunday, 29 April 2012

Last week may have drawn to a close, but the march of Clevo news continues. On the heels of Maingear announcing an 11-inch gaming notebook, Origin PC is throwing its own ultraportable into the ring: the EON 11-S. Though this is a new model for the company (the smallest laptop it's ever sold, in fact), it's not quite fresh to us: this is the same exact Clevo-made notebook Maingear unveiled two days ago, only re-badged under Origin PC's brand and available in a wider range of colors. As far as performance goes, then, that means you can expect Ivy Bridge processors, a 2GB NVIDIA GT 650M GPU, Optimus graphics-switching technology and a battery rated for 6.5 hours of runtime. In Origin PC's case, the laptop starts at $999 (compared with $1,099 for Maingear), though you'll have to head over to Origin's site for a breakdown of what specs you'll be getting at that lower price.

Tuesday, 24 April 2012

AMD kicked off 2012 by refreshing its desktop graphics, and now it's back, giving its mobile GPUs the same treatment. The company just announced its third generation of DirectX 11 mobile chips, the Radeon HD 7000 family. All told, the collection includes three 28nm GPUs: the high-end 7900M, the mainstream 7800M and, last but not least, the 7700M, a darling little chip intended for AMD's thin and light Ultrabook competitors. Across the board, the series ushers in a new feature AMD is calling Enduro, a graphics-switching technology that takes direct aim at NVIDIA Optimus. Building on older AMD technologies like PowerXpress, it doesn't require you to close apps, reboot your system or manually specify which apps will trigger the GPU. Additionally, it's designed to work with both Intel CPUs and AMD's own application processing units, so presumably you'll find this inside some Ivy Bridge machines too. With this generation, too, the two higher-end chips support the PCI Express 3.0 interface, and all three make use of AMD's existing ZeroCore Power and Power Gating battery-saving features. That's the abridged version, but we also have a full breakdown of the specs awaiting you past the break.

Saturday, 21 April 2012

Want to stay unplugged for a while? Available NVIDIA Optimus technology automatically adjusts your graphics power to the task at hand (Optimus™ technology not available on 3-D Enabled units). End result: On demand power without sacrificing battery life or performance.

Apple implemented the switching of the two graphic cards using a"chip" dubbed the "gmux". This gmux can power down the dedicatedgraphics card, switch the DDC, internal and external displayconnections individually between both cards and then set the backlightbrightness. Unlike most newer laptops with hybrid graphics, Apple'sMacbook Pros still use a physical mux.

The gmux has remained mostly the same between all models withswitchable graphics, so it should be possible to develop one Linuxdriver that supports all of them.

Andreas Heider took over previous work that Seth Forshee (CanonicalLtd.) recently rewrote it into a clean, backlight-only driver that (atthe time of this writing, 20120414) will hopefully find it's way intothe mainline Linux kernel soon.

Andreas has been developing on his MBP 6,2 model (MBP 6,1 should beexactly the same) and his work is available at:

There is a version that works with the Nvidia nouveau drivers and isintegrated with Bumblebee 3.0+. The apple_gmux driver should work forall models with switchable graphics, but the nouveau components andthe current method to enable the Intel card in BIOS emulation modewill differ. But once switching works well on one model, it shouldn'tbe too hard to make it work on the others.

So, not all is done and dusted, and this is the current status: at themoment switching works, but it's not fully automated. It's still notpossible to simply boot the system, switch between nouveau/i915 andturn the dedicated card on/off.

This is not only related to the gmux driver itself but also tonouveau/i915 and how they handle not having a monitor attached atboot. So one option to thousand+ members of the hybrid-graphics-linuxteam is to just wait for a bit longer, or try the code in a testsystem and help Andreas by reporting back the details of theinvestigations.

In other news, Andreas found a first solution to the VBIOSproblem. There is a register on the card (0x619f04,PDISPLAY.VGA.ROM_WINDOW) which points to where the VBIOS shouldbe. Initially this register is set to 0x000ffe09 on the card but aftera powercycle it's set to 0x1.

If one manually restores it to 0xffe09 using nvapoke and copy theVBIOS back with nvafakebios, both nouveau and the nvidia-blob loadsuccessfully.

A full demo showing the switching between the GPUs, Bumblebee withboth nvidia and nouveau is available here:

The current issues are with using EFI boot, because the Intel carddoesn't work with suspend in BIOS mode. The IRC discussions with mjg59and airlied resulted in patches to sort out the boot GPU detection onApple EFI. Another major issue is the Intel LVDS detection. Accordingto airlied, the way to go is switch_ddc, which requires to change allGPU drivers to call a function before reading the EDID data for theinternal display. This in turn switches the EDID line. Some work hasalready been done, but it's not finished yet. The other line ofinvestigation is using reprobe and try to redetect and recreate theframebuffer upon a GPU switch. At the time of this writing, thisdoesn't seem to work well with the current DRM/fbconinfrastructure.

If you own a Macbook Pro 6,2 or 6,1 and are adventurous enough to tryit you can find the code here:

The newer models use AMD graphics instead of Nvidia, although Apple isrumoured to go back to Nvidia in upcoming models (as of 20120414). Itwould be great to have users testing graphics switching on othermodels, so email the mailing list if you are interested in tinkeringwith this:

The plan from now on is to clean things up and hopefully get some ofthis work merged upstream. Please get in touch if you have experiencewith the linux graphics stack and you are willing to help out solvingissues like the reprobe/lock_ddc situation. There are also issues withthe Intel cards that have to do with resuming after a suspend, whichare in need of expert hands.

For more information on the hardware details, find below an excellentdocument: